Subject Area: Victorian Era

Painter, Megan2001 0-7734-7680-6 148 pagesThis study aims to show that the aesthetic of the dramatic monologue and the experience for the reader is neither empirical nor relativistic, but an exercise in faith that follows romanticism in creating a poetry which attempts to reaffirm a moral world though an artistic product in which poet and reader jointly come to a common judgment.

Davis, Graham2010 0-7734-3788-6 392 pagesThis is an intensively researched study that examines the history of Bath and makes a contribution to an understanding of the way urban communities worked. The rhetoric of the city and the slum are both challenged and the interconnections between them examined in detailed case studies. In reality, the municipal politics of Bath, particularly in the field of sanitary provision, was shaped by competing attitudes to the poor of the Avon Street district. This book contains seven color photographs and eight black and white photograhs.

Morley, Ian2008 0-7734-5090-4 408 pagesThis work consists of an examination of examples of civic design in Britain occurring within a number of large sized provincial settlements from about 1880 to 1914. It identifies the design and planning principles that appeared to govern civic design as well as investigating its features as it appeared in practice by analysing structural and technical design components, internal arrangements and the surroundings of public buildings erected at the time. This book contains six color photographs and twelve black and white photographs.

Dennis, Barbara1992 0-7734-9544-4 204 pagesIn her time Charlotte Yonge (whose publications from first to last span the precise years of Victoria's reign) was as popular as Dickens. Her novels reflect her close involvement with John Keble, inaugurator of the Movement, and record every stage and detail of the Movement throughout the century at parish level, and how it was received by the middle-classes in a rapidly-changing society. In the light of new biographical discoveries, published and unpublished letters, non-fiction material such as her articles in the Monthly Packet, and consequent re-reading of Charlotte Yonge's novels, this study reveals the pervasiveness of the Oxford Movement in society.

Scheuerle, William H2012 0-7734-4516-1 140 pagesThe work argues that the ascendency of croquet as a popular sport in England during the middle to late nineteenth century was a direct result of class. He traces the history of the sport and finds that it was one of if not the first sport that men and women could enjoy together. The game initially had an elite social status attached to it: it was first seen as a game suitable for the British gentry, especially for those families whose estates had extensive lawns, or for families wealthy enough to join croquet clubs. It attracted many people because it had a certain ‘snob’ appeal and formed as an upper class leisure time activity, and developed with the middle class due to their rising number at that time.

Halladay, Jean1993 0-7734-9187-2 156 pagesThis study examines a confused and confusing literary period by examining the minor poets of that time. The minor poets were then, as are the minor poets of today, extremely important in forming and shaping the artistic patterns of their time. For each of the poets there is a brief biographical sketch, an examination of the literary influences on each, major themes, ideas and motifs, and representative poems.

Smith, Arnold Ian2014 0-7734-4301-0 416 pagesThe work focuses on what led to the establishment of the unheroic in Victorian opera. It focuses sharply on two instrumental factors that gave rise to the unheroic; middleclassness and Victorian ideas on the morality and immorality of music.
An interdisciplinary examination of the literary, musical, and sociological aspects of the works written for the Victorian lyric stage. It presents a vivid picture of the 19th century English lyric stage and provides a framework for this study by examining some of the 17th and 18th century forerunners of the Victorian operatic repertoire.

Tatum, Karen E2005 0-7734-5989-8 212 pagesExamines the causes of the abject response in canonical novels such as Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva outlines her theory of abjection as a simultaneous fascination and horror stemming from sensorial reminders of the subject’s primal, psychological relation to the mother. The author suggests that these psychological perspectives can potentially result in acts of physical violence, which are called “abject response”. By developing Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection as a model for reading physical acts of violence against women, the book yields specific answers to its overriding questions: Why was a female body so threatening in nineteenth-century fiction? The answer lies in social constructions of women as powers of horror, which the male subject imbibes and which lead to domestic violence if improperly balanced.

Morris, John1993 0-7734-9325-5 304 pagesThese essays explore the nature and effect of differing categories of stereotype: racial, social, sexual, class media, cultural, etc. Essays examine how best-selling novels gain their effect from the use of stereotyping of the Negro and Jew; the way in which women in Victorian England were expected to be seen; the use of working-class stereotypes; how literature and other cultural productions portray people and situations in terms of the media even to the extent of their being reduced to electronically projected images representative of the accelerating standardization and mechanization of mass society.

Manson, Cynrhia DeMarcus2008 0-7734-5102-1 168 pagesDespite growing scholarly recognition of subversive social and political content in Victorian fairy tales, their significance in relation to the oft-cited Victorian “spiritual crisis” remains largely unexplored. This interdisciplinary study addresses the critical gap by examining three literary revisions of Sleeping Beauty from the early 1860s as pointed efforts to enter the intensified religious debate following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species. This book contains two color photographs.

Davies, Douglas1991 0-88946-925-3 472 pagesIn the twenty years before and after 1900, Frank Byron Jevons, one of the last Victorian polymaths, gave himself successively to the study of classics, philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, and comparative religion. He was also concerned with social and national issues, especially the education of the working classes and of women. This brief biography is an intellectual history in which each chapter explores specific themes in his life.

Camus, Marianne2004 0-7734-6334-8 108 pagesAn attempt to re-read the construction of the mad female characters of Dickens’ novels. A main aim is to demonstrate how social rules and forces differentiate mental derangement gender-wise, as far as its causes and manifestations are concerned, within what could be called, in Dickens’ fiction, a general human tendency toward mental derangement. A further aim is to qualify Dickens’ reputation for misogynistic blindness and prejudice.

McKay, Brenda2003 0-7734-6621-5 636 pagesThis interdisciplinary approach to Eliot’s writings places her within the wider context of debates on racial and cultural differences, furnishing an altered context for scholars to return to her fiction and poetry. It brings together a discussion of her fiction with an account of the activities of Victorian members of groups such as the Anthropological Society, scrutinizing Eliot’s dislike of colonialism and her responses to the Indian Mutiny and the Jamaica rebellion. It also examines Victorian attitudes to Gypsies, Black slaves, Indians, Jews and Turks. The novels are discussed within the context of contemporary theories about race, with reference to Robert Knox, Darwin, Huxley, and the work of social philosophers Comte and Herbert Spencer. It also discusses a range of other writers in relation to Eliot, including J. G. Herder, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the ethnologists J. C. Prichard and Gobineau, and Jewish writers Halevi, Maimonides, and Luria.

Korg, Jacob1992 0-7734-9533-9 100 pagesThis essay was part of the brilliant record Gissing compiled as a student at Owens College, Manchester. Written at the age of fifteen, it reflects an excellent knowledge of Burns' life and work. While it does not reveal anything new, it is of value as an indication of Gissing's mind in youth, and also accurately reflects the Victorian attitude toward Burns. This volume includes a selection of Burns's poems.

Prior, Karen Swallow2003 0-7734-6699-1 174 pagesThis work provides both an introduction to the genre of the didactic religious novel and the culture of evangelicalism that was developing halfway through Hannah More's life, reaching its full flowering at about the time of her death in 1833.

Sasso, Eleonora2012 0-7734-3913-7 224 pagesThis text is the first to examine the influence of William Morris on the artistic, literary, and ideological styles of Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing, and Yeats. The focus is on a selection of Morris’ writings and situates them in the fields of art, culture, and society. Through Roland Barthes’ approach to interpreting text, Sasso demonstrates that Tennyson, Swinburne, Gissing, and Yeats were all readers of Morris’ work which in turn stimulated their own writing and infused them with desire. Shows how Morris’ influence caused his contemporaries to emulate his style of writing and how that style ultimately framed the mind of Victorian England.

Preece, Rod2005 0-7734-6069-1 296 pagesWhether animals possessed immortal souls was a controversial topic in the nineteenth century. Answers to the question constituted an important manner of addressing the status of animals. While relatively little was written on the theme, the issue was a common topic of conversation, as it had also been in the prior centuries. The contributions to the subject presented in this volume were among the most significant of the Victorian era, coming from members of the newly established veterinary profession and from an author with a general interest in theological questions. These essays demonstrate Victorian patterns of thought on the human-animal relationship and help modern scholars understand the complexities of the contemporary approach to the status of animals. In addition to the essays, the editor provides a substantial introduction and detailed annotation which allow the modern scholar to both place Victorian ideas on this topic in the context of the thought of prior and later centuries, and also to understand the context of Victorian society in which these matters were addressed.

Kim, Stephen1996 0-7734-2278-1 230 pagesThis is a study of the contribution to the secularization of Victorian culture made by John Tyndall, who, as a natural philosopher and colleague of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Louis Pasteur, succeeded Michael Farady as the Superintendent of the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1870. He occupies a central place in the history of the establishment of scientific naturalism, contributing to the intellectual and cultural transformation of Victorian England. This study examines the relation between theology and science, which occasioned a major shift in the way the self, nature, and the cosmos were understood.

Tipper, Karen Sasha2013 0-7734-4501-3 232 pagesThe current final volume is a collection of correspondence written by Lady Jane Wilde to her daughter-in-law, Constance Wilde, as well as other friends and acquaintances. Lady Wilde, like her son Oscar, was an excellent writer. She had a wide range of interests. Much of the ridicule directed at Lady Wilde and her writing and lifestyle followed the imprisonment of her son in 1894 and reflected Victorian prejudices. These letters provide a different picture: that of a reflective, intelligent and kind woman.

An excellent work in deciphering Lady Wilde’s personal handwritten letters and correspondence. An invaluable source of new information to scholars reassessing the lives of the Wildes, studying the status of women, or working in the field of Irish literature.

Graham-Jones, Ian2010 0-7734-1383-9 204 pagesThis study of the nineteenth-century British composer Alice Mary Smith’s life and music draws on newly discovered documents and manuscripts. The volume also includes information on five other women composers from this era.

Author’s Abstract:
At a time when women were thought to succeed only in composing drawing-room songs or light-weight piano pieces, Alice Mary Smith (1839-1884) wrote by far the greatest number of larger-scale art works of any British woman composer in the nineteenth century. She was most probably the first woman to have written – and had performed – a symphony, composed in 1863 at the age of twenty-four. Two of her six concert overtures were
regularly performed by distinguished conductors of the time, and her four cantatas for choir and
orchestra achieved some popularity in the last years of her short life.

This study also briefly outlines the work of five other women composers of her time who attempted the higher forms of the art, and examines, from
contemporary sources, the argument, current at the time, as to whether a woman could ever compose a ‘great’ work.

Norman, Paralee2000 0-7734-7689-X 160 pagesMarmion Savage wrote in Dublin during the notorious potato famines; criticizing extremes of political intellectual behavior which he believed were taking his homeland into the wrong directions. His five novels express these ideas, leaving few groups unscathed, including nearly all major Irish factions, political or not, many of the English, and even Americans from whose gigantic ‘wilderness’ and the resulting plethora of working class people’s dangers he wished to save his starving countrymen. This unbiased critical biography, based on twenty years of research, erases years of scholarly neglect, piecing together fragments of truth and falsehood.. For the first time, his persistent use of light satire is defined and recognized. He wrote multi-subgeneric novels with one dominant mode, a form typical in Victorian fiction. These are analyzed and explained, with brief summaries of his five long novels (now out of print), and illustrated in detail. The study includes a complete modern collected bibliography, a summary of all known criticism from his times, with detailed appendices, which includes an index.

Rogal, Samuel J.2006 0-7734-5957-X 636 pagesBetween 1876 and 1903, the English intellectual historian Leslie Stephen, the Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky, and the American historian and educator (not yet turned politician) Thomas Woodrow Wilson, fixed their separate attentions upon John Wesley and eighteenth-century Methodism, each for a different purpose and each achieving a different conclusion. However, a number of common threads wove themselves among each writer. None embraced Methodism: Stephen confessed to no denomination; Lecky paid proper but minimal service to the established Churches of England and Ireland; Wilson wrapped himself firmly within the mantle of nineteenth-century American Calvinist Presbyterianism. Each recognized Wesley as a significant contributor to the history of his times; each viewed Wesley’s evangelical organization as one means of raising the spiritual and moral values of the British nation; each identified significant weaknesses in the man, in his organization, in his overall accomplishments.

Rogal, Samuel J.2006 0-7734-5959-6 188 pagesBetween 1876 and 1903, the English intellectual historian Leslie Stephen, the Irish historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky, and the American historian and educator (not yet turned politician) Thomas Woodrow Wilson, fixed their separate attentions upon John Wesley and eighteenth-century Methodism, each for a different purpose and each achieving a different conclusion. However, a number of common threads wove themselves among each writer. None embraced Methodism: Stephen confessed to no denomination; Lecky paid proper but minimal service to the established Churches of England and Ireland; Wilson wrapped himself firmly within the mantle of nineteenth-century American Calvinist Presbyterianism. Each recognized Wesley as a significant contributor to the history of his times; each viewed Wesley’s evangelical organization as one means of raising the spiritual and moral values of the British nation; each identified significant weaknesses in the man, in his organization, in his overall accomplishments, clarify, and correct the focal points of each argument.

Lowenthal, Kristi2015 1-4955-0372-0 140 pages“Lowenthal’s monograph on the rivalry between Mabel Lee and Louise Pound at the University of Nebraska, fills an important void in the current scholarship on the history of women in intercollegiate athletics and physical education. In many ways, these two women, though they took a decidedly different approach to women’s athletics, were pioneers in the area of women’s physical education.”-Dr. Jeanne T. Heidler,
Professor of History, Chief American History Division,
United States Air Force Academy

Monsman, Gerald1998 0-7734-8362-4 140 pagesThis study examines the views and conflicts of Queen Victoria's 'Age of Empire' concerning nature and society, the arts, personal identity and vocation, from the fresh perspective of educational practice, through scrutiny of an elite, organized group of Oxford University undergraduates who later pursued diverse professions in law and government, higher education and literature. Between 1856-1866 this essay society, call the Old Mortality, gained substantial renown within Oxford circles. This is the first book-length study on this group, whose membership included A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, A. V. Dicey, James Bryce, T. G. Green, J. A. Symonds, Edward Caird, S. P. Ilbert, and numerous other soon-to-be-eminent Victorians.

Bloom, Abigail Burnham2008 0-7734-4888-8 836 pagesExamines extracts from the autobiographies of fifty-two nineteenth-century British women from across the social spectrum and their attitudes towards liminal female experiences.

Wallis, Frank1993 0-7734-9324-7 292 pagesUnlike other approaches to this problem, this study recognizes the value of psychological insights on bias and stereotyping. It posits the idea that religion-based conflicts can be examined and understood like any other prejudice. Evidence is extensive: parliamentary debates, select committee reports, petitions, secular periodicals, religious journals, and the reports and tracts of ultra-Protestant organizations. Anti-Catholic prejudice is traced along its major avenues of hostility: the obsession with "watchfulness"; the "Papal Aggression" episode; massive opposition to state funding of St. Patrick's College; the battle over the notion of a Protestant constitution; the campaign against convents; and the impact of Irish immigration.

Woelfel, James1997 0-7734-8423-X 132 pagesThis volume approaches the extraordinarily rich dialogue between faith and doubt in the Victorian era through a series of intellectual 'portraits' that express and personalize the creative ferment and diversity of the period. Essays include; the Christian Humanism of Anne Brontë; Henry Longueville Mansel - A British Kierkegaard?; Stoicism and Christianity - Four Modern Perspectives; Leslie Stephen, Evangelical Agnostic; J. R. Illingworth - Portrait of a Theological Era; Religion as Imaginative Moral Valuation - Matthew Arnold and George Santayana; William James on Victorian Agnosticism - A Strange Blindness.

Paz, Denis1986 0-88946-662-9 418 pagesThe first biography of Pierce Connelly (1804-1883), whose life illustrated various 19th-century themes of what the author calls "Anglo-American religious warfare," most notably the role played by several apostate priests, but primarily Connelly, in Victorian spiritual warfare.

Fasick, Laura2003 0-7734-6716-5 212 pagesExamines the ethos of intellectual work for men in a set of novels strongly influenced by Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Age’s prime proponent of work. It questions the longstanding tradition of regarding the 19th century as a time when a stern work ethic flourished in successful opposition to gentler, female-identified values of domesticity and nurture. This book argues that an over-emphasis on domesticity as the source of virtue and happiness led to a devaluation of the satisfactions to be found in intellectual and vocational arenas separate from domestic life.

Miller, Renata Kobetts2005 0-7734-5991-X 272 pagesThis examination of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and its reinterpretations presents original interviews with novelists Emma Tennant and Valerie Martin, and playwright David Edgar, framed by analysis of their works. In so doing, it moves away from common division between those who write literature and those who write about literature. Its examination of Stevenson’s original novel and its comprehensive survey of the history of Jekyll and Hyde reveals that these three late twentieth-century writers react against the tradition of reinterpretations and recover Stevenson’s structure. Arguing that their returns to a Victorian text are motivated by contemporary concerns about class and gender politics that find an apt vehicle for exploration in Stevenson’s story, this book identifies a trend of neo-Victorianism – an attraction to cultural products of the Victorian period that results, not from a desire for a time of greater elegance and leisure, but from perceived similarities between our time and that of over one hundred years ago. The interviews in this book foreground the authors’ own political concerns, their views on why Stevenson’s story lends itself to reinterpretation over one hundred years after it first appeared, the research that they performed to prepare for writing their adaptations, and the choices that they made while writing.

Williams, Anthony2000 0-7734-7745-4 248 pagesDuring the 19th century, the proportion of the population living in cities increased significantly, and the experience of life for those undergoing the urbanising process changed radically. This work examines theatrical responses to this phenomenon, concentrating on plays treating the experience of life in the metropolis as it changed over a 60 year period. There is a particular, though not exclusive, focus on the social class level involved: popular melodrama treats issues very close to the actual experiences of those attending the melodrama houses, many of them in the East End and on the Surrey side of the Thames, away from the fashionable theatres. Cross-references are made to popular fiction and non-fiction where relevant, as well as to major cultural and historical changes. Issues include crime, policing and prisons; changing attitudes toward the underclass; the search for occupation and finding a space to live; relationship between past and present; plight of the migrant; the impact of the railways.

Graber, Gary1993 0-7734-2216-1 204 pagesThis book traces the history of anti-ritualist legislation that led to the Public Worship Regulation Act and its results. Its goal is not only the better understanding of this particular Act, but appreciation for the problems encountered during the ritualistic controversy as well. It examines events and issues in Parliament, the church, the ecclesiastical court system, and the country at large. Specific bills, judgments, and reports are categorized and placed in historical context, and the story of the Public Worship Regulation Act is followed from initial draft to Royal Assent. Finally, the events that followed passage are considered to round out the work.

Moses, Gary2007 0-7734-5277-X 272 pagesThis book examines a campaign of moral reform conducted by Church of England clergymen against hiring fairs and farm service in the East Riding region of Yorkshire during the mid-Victorian years. In analyzing the nature and impact of the campaign, and placing it within its economic and religious context, this study makes a significant contribution to the history of nineteenth-century rural society. This book contains 3 black and white photographs.

Manwaring, Randle2004 0-7734-6330-5 160 pagesFashions in hymn-writing have fluctuated widely since Issac Watts, as a young man in the 17th century, pioneered the art. Until then, churches only sang psalms, later paraphrases, to be followed by the vast output of thousands of hymns by Watts and then by Charles Wesley. Both men became poets in their own right. Later, Victorians took up hymn-writing on a huge scale and in recent times excellent new hymns have been written, often referred to as songs although, sadly, some strong in devotion and sentiment, have been weak in poetry. The contention of this book, the author’s second on the subject, is that hymnody should always be sound in poetic construction and that as, Wesley declared, it should reflect the strength and purity of the English language.

Ankeny, Rebecca2000 0-7734-7728-4 172 pagesEmphasizes George MacDonald’s achievement as a Victorian novelist, critic, and thinker who anticipates many of the issues surrounding readers, texts, and authors we tend to think of as modern or postmodern. It also shows his awareness of the role of faith in these literary interrelationships. It examines novels which are often overlooked, such as Sir Gibbie and Wilfrid Cumbermede, finding in these more realistic works similar textual preoccupations to those in the fantasies.

Boos, Florence1991 0-88946-933-4 592 pagesExamines The Earthly Paradise as the first mature poetic expression of Morris' view that a poet is also a historian who bears the immense responsibility of creation and narration. Details one of the longest and most complex single poetic narratives in the English language along several lines: systematic use of multiple narrators and audiences which deepen the poem's sense of shared experience and impose a coherent structure on its temporal and other discontinuities; the alterations of confession, description, and retrospection in the frame and inner tales that enabled Morris to complete one of the fullest Victorian meditations on the creation of identity through frustrated love and sorrow; the flexibility and subtlety of the poem's various allegorical resonances and narrative levels; and the "stoic," aesthetic, and political implications of Morris' evolving ideal of friendship.

Crozier-De Rosa, Sharon2010 0-7734-3739-8 428 pagesThis book builds on the large volume of existing literature that details the social, moral and economic context in which women of this era operated. It further complements the smaller body of existing writing that probes the interior lives of women. However, where as these latter works use personal documents, such as diaries and letters, to gain insight into the interior lives of mainly upper middle- and upper-class women, this study concentrates on women from the lower and middle levels of the middle classes and on those from the upper rungs of the lower classes.

Rosemary Julia Barrow2007 0-7734-5443-8 292 pagesThis book explores the reception of the classical world in painting from the mid-Victorian period to the second decade of the twentieth century, by seeking: to identify and interpret the artists’ choices of ancient textual and archaeological source material; to investigate significant relationships between particular works and contemporary literature and society; and to situate Victorian classicism in the visual arts within the practices of Victorian painting and the classical tradition. The nineteenth century witnessed important developments and discoveries in classical scholarship and archaeology which, along with major shifts in general sensibility, inevitably affected both academic and popular perceptions of antiquity. Drawing on such perceptions, painters in Victorian Britain brought new approaches to the visualization of the ancient past. Today, popular notions of classical-subject painting envision escapist images of a dreamy and idyllic ancient world. The stereotype is not wholly without foundation, but it drastically misrepresents the sophistication of Victorian constructions of antiquity which, among much else, make clear distinctions between representations of Rome and Greece and are capable of a strikingly original, and often deeply ironic, use of themes, motifs and allusions. This reality illustrates that, although classicism impinged on Victorian culture in a way that is almost unimaginable today, many artists acquired an unexpectedly precise and sophisticated knowledge of ancient history, literature and archaeology.

Potter, Jr., Clifton W2010 0-7734-3722-3 380 pagesThis work examines the gender politics of Victorian Britain through an analysis of nineteenth-century representations of Queen Elizabeth I. The book includes a study of how women regarded powerful females.

Covert, James1998 0-7734-8500-7 352 pagesThis collection of 161 letters provides a unique window into the intimate inner workings of a particular upper-middle-class Victorian household. The first letter was written on January 10, 1872 during Louise's honeymoon in Paris, and the last on November 30, 1880 just a few weeks before her mother's death. Louise Creighton was not only the wife and biographer of her famous husband, Bishop Mandell Creighton, but she has emerged as a moderate Christian feminist in an era when women's causes seemed to be generally articulated by more militant voices. The letters also reveal much about the academic and social life in Oxford and later in a quaint village in Northumberland where Louise records her duties as a vicar's wife. Other fascinating sections in her letters are the descriptions of managing her household of servants (cook, gardener, nurse, governess, maids and groom), shopping, planning her garden - the more impressive when remembering that during this period she was in her twenties. Both she and her husband wrote books, traveled frequently to the continent, entertained widely, and engaged in social life with the local gentry and county nobility. With illustrations.

Michalson, Karen1990 0-88946-378-6 300 pagesExamines the non-literary and non-aesthetic reasons underlying the bias in favor of realism in the formation of the traditional literary canon on nineteenth-century British fiction. Examines the role of the Anglican Church as well as that of Non-Conformist or Dissenting evangelical sects in the educational institutions of the first half of the century, and the function the academic study of English literature in British imperialist ideology in the latter part of the century. Demonstrates that both Church and Empire needed a canon of realism to promote their own brand of conservative ideology. Victorian fantasy writers often targeted Church doctrine or imperial dogma for especially satirical treatment, thus insuring their own exclusion from the universities which were run by the Church and operated to supply patriotic administrators to the Empire.

Wadman, Carrie2015 1-4955-0297-X 360 pagesA fresh point of inquiry on the ‘spinster figure’ that offers a compelling reconsideration of gender, literature and culture in late nineteenth century England. This interdisciplinary approach to sources, including novels, popular press articles, book reviews, medical and psychological texts, as well as travel narratives reveals the ubiquitous nature of the ‘spinster figure’, which was invoked in creative, critical, political and medical debates of the late nineteenth century.

DeCicco, Lynne1996 0-7734-8756-5 328 pagesExamines three mid-Victorian novels that highlight prevailing attitudes toward both women and lawyers: Charles Dickens's Bleak House; Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White; and George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical. The novels reflect the confluence of social issues: the public's suspicion of lawyers and the law's own hostility toward women. To qualify the underpinnings of this tension more completely, the first chapter looks at three short works by Herman Melville: "the paradise of Bachelors", "The Tartarus Maids", and "Bartleby the Scrivener". These pieces crystallize the difficulties women encounter when confronted with a legal world, and set the framework for what will be examined in the novels. The volume also includes a chapter providing an overview of the legal profession in England, outlining the kinds of marginality experienced by both lawyers, particularly solicitors, and women, who were struggling for legal identity.

Rivers, Bronwyn2005 0-7734-5903-0 252 pagesAlthough middle-class women’s work was one of the major social and feminist issues of the mid-Victorian period, literary critics have yet to give extended consideration to the way women novelists treated this topic. This book examines the form and ideologies of mid-Victorian novels that represent middle-class women at work.

The study locates women’s novels of the period within a discourse of women’s work that included writing by the Langham Place feminists, Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewis, and Harriett Martineau. Focusing on novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontë sisters, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, but also examining the work of lesser-known writers such as Amelia B. Edwards, Louise Costello and Ouida, this work examines how both ideologies and rhetorical forms circulated within fictional and non-fictional writing.

The work debate fundamentally challenged social beliefs about women’s sexual and class status, their economic and marital positions, and their educational and occupational opportunities. The demands of work reformers conflicted with the domestic ideology of womanhood, which assumed that middle-class women would remain as the moral centre of the domestic sphere, supported by their husbands or fathers.

By examining the way that novels both influenced and were influenced by this ideology, this book demonstrates how Victorian novels contributed to the imaginative and ideological changes of that most important aspect of female emancipation, women’s work.

Forbes, Shannon2006 0-7734-5823-9 188 pagesThis book explores the modern novel’s reflection upon women’s enactment of the stable, whole, unified Victorian identity and anticipation of the successes that will result when women in the modern era find the means to embrace their dynamic, fluid, modern identity. This work will appeal to literary critics of Victorian and modern texts.